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Jo-Anne McArthur

MONKEY

I met photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur on Facebook. I was surfing my feed one day and was stopped by an image. Instantly, the photograph of a pig’s eye peering through the steel ventilation hole of a transport truck made me gasp. That one eye conveyed so much of the pig’s despair. I shuddered. A tear dropped. My index finger clicked on the link, and I was taken to We Animals.

A lightbulb went off when I saw Jo-Anne’s name. She initiated the project called We Animals to document the plight of “the invisibles,” as she calls them: animals used for food, for clothing, in research, and for entertainment. We’d both been profiled for our animal welfare work in the book One Hundred & One Reasons to Get Out of Bed by Natasha Milne and Barbara Royal, and I was intrigued to learn more about the investigative photojournalist and author, who’d been the subject of the highly acclaimed documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine.

In one photograph, Jo-Anne had been able to tell a story that would have taken me a week to write. She has a profound ability to affect people with images so that they’re moved to create change, and one of her gifts to the world is a database of photographs that she offers for free to campaigns dedicated to ending animal suffering. With her unique talent, Jo-Anne shows us the world, perhaps not as we’d wish it, but how it truly is, and provides us with plenty of opportunities to change it.

Her awakening came when she was twenty-one years old and on a hiking trip with friends in Ecuador. While walking through a mountain village, the young Canadian came across a monkey chained to the side of a building. As tourists gathered to snap pictures, using the monkey as a prop, she turned her lens on the helpless animal to document his sad story.

Baños, Ecuador

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be around animals. It wasn’t just that I loved animals, but I had a deep curiosity about them, as well as concern for them. For me, being with animals has always given me instant joy. I could even describe it as relief.

My parents let me be the way I was with animals even though they didn’t feel as I did. We had birds at home, and I didn’t want them caged, so they allowed me to let the birds fly around when I persisted in asking if they could be let out in the house. My sister and I also had rabbits and guinea pigs that we loved, but they were relegated to live in the garage, which made me sad. When the neighbor’s dog, Duke, a shepherd/Rottie mix, barked and cried endlessly from being left outside throughout the year, I asked the neighbors if I could walk him. They agreed, and to this day I can recall the happiness I felt — and Duke’s, too.

What I learned as a young person is that animals, whether wild or domesticated, are fascinating individuals, and that often, they need our care or reverence but aren’t getting it. It wasn’t until later in life that I learned that I could channel that concern for animals into transformative actions.

When I was twenty-one years old, I had an experience with a macaque monkey that changed my life. At the time, I was a student at the University of Ottawa, in Canada, studying human geography and English literature. I was on a hiking trip in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, South America, with two friends from school. We were on our second day of a two-day hike and had spent most of it in the clouds on the lushly green volcanic mountain Tungurahua.

That afternoon, we made our way to the popular tourist town of Baños to spend the night. As we entered the town, passing houses, I stopped when I noticed a group of people had gathered around a building. As I got closer I realized they were looking at a monkey who was chained to the bars of a windowless sill. He was alone and vulnerable, perched between a concrete block and a pillar with no water or food source. His hair was a mixed color of gray and tan with a dark crown on his head. It struck me that he had absolutely nowhere to go but that sill.

The sight of him had attracted attention, but not in a good way. People were stopping to have their pictures taken with him. He responded by straining against the chain to reach into their jackets and bags for food. And he found it and quickly ate it, causing laughter.

I stopped to take photos as well. This was an epiphanic moment for me. While everyone was taking photos because they thought the situation was funny, or unique, or cute, I took pictures because I thought that what I was witnessing was terribly cruel. It dawned on me at the time that if I took photos, I could share them and somehow change his situation. I wanted to show this picture all around so that people would react with sadness and dismay. This wasn’t funny or unique or cute! This was an animal living as a slave.

This short encounter made me realize that I saw animals differently from how many other people did. I saw both individual creatures and their circumstances. I wondered about their history — where they came from and where their family was.

This was also a moment when I realized I could use my camera for change. Until that time, I’d been searching for “my story.” That’s what photojournalists do: We search for stories. But more so, we look for something that is ours, something we can return to, something we care deeply about. I realized that no one was photographing animals the way I did, the way I could.

After this revelation, I started turning my camera toward animals as much as I could. I call these “the invisibles.” They are the animals who are right in front of us, and yet we fail to see or really consider them. A project began to take shape. I knew I wanted my animal work to be called We Animals. It would be a reminder that we are all animals — different but with so much unexplored commonality. My goal was to take photos that bridged the gap, that brought us closer to the experiences of our animal kin, in hopes that maybe we’d learn to treat them better, to respect them, to not abuse them or see them as objects, as “other.”

I became really driven by this project because I saw that very few photographers were documenting “the invisibles.” While it’s perfectly fine to photograph cats and dogs or the charismatic megafauna on the cover of National Geographic, who was looking at the billions of animals we keep in factory farms, fur farms, labs, and the small cages of roadside zoos? So many of these animals are totally out of sight. That’s part of why we sort of go along on our merry way, eating them, wearing them, using cosmetics that are tested on them. We don’t see, we don’t know. I resolved to lift the blinders by taking pictures. By going to the places no one gets to see, such as pig farms in Spain, mink farms in Sweden, sheep sale yards in Australia, and slaughterhouses in Tanzania and Canada.

My work devastates me. Seeing hens crammed into cages so small they can’t turn around, standing on their dead cage mates to alleviate the pain in their feet from standing on wire flooring. The pigs unable to turn around in gestation crates. The foxes in fur farms gnawing at the bars until their gums are raw and infected, trying to find a way out. I wanted to save all these animals, but I couldn’t. I’ve met hundreds of thousands of them now. The best way I could help them was by making their lives and their suffering known. I’ve learned that perseverance is an important part of what we all do in life, especially when it comes to creating social change.

After years in the field on all seven continents — okay, I didn’t land on Antarctica, but I bobbed around it on a Sea Shepherd boat for three months! — this work has opened my eyes to the immense suffering of animals. When you’re faced with it — with thousands of animals crammed into one stinky, urine-saturated barn — and you look into their eyes and they look into yours, the suffering becomes real. It’s tangible, and it’s worse than any horror movie. I get to leave, but they can’t. And this is all because there are so many of us — and so many of us wanting cheap meat without thinking about where it comes from.

Like us, nonhuman animals experience all sorts of complex emotions, from jealousy to fear to silliness. Lots of animals have a fun sense of humor. But I’ve witnessed them locked up all over the world, and their eyes look at you full of questions. That’s the thing about these animals: They have all the questions and we have all the answers. They seem to ask, What are you doing to me? Are you going to hurt me? Are you going to take away my babies? What’s next? Some animals are despondent. Others remain wild, or brave, and try to fight against their confines. I’m not sure which makes me sadder.

Yet I have hope. It’s an exciting time to be an animal rights photojournalist. The work — mine and others’ — is being published, discussed, and recognized. Finally, people are starting to look, and see, and change.

Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photojournalist, author, and humane educator. Her incredible work has been used in investigations, campaigns, protests, and academic pursuits around the world. It has contributed to the shuttering of animal-breeding facilities and has been used to create animal-protection laws. She offers the free use of her images to animal welfare organizations.

Jo-Anne is the author of We Animals, a book based on her life’s work, and a second book, Captive. Jo-Anne’s other initiative is the Unbound project, where she highlights women on the front lines of animal advocacy. Photographs for the We Animals project have been shot in more than fifty countries and have contributed to more than two hundred global campaigns to end the suffering of billions of animals.

Have you ever rescued a ladybug?

No, but I do remember saving a dragonfly who was drowning in a lake. He spent a half hour on my hand, drying himself off.

Name three things that make you happy.

Animals. Learning. Loving.

What one book, documentary, or speech has had a profound effect on you?

There are many animal documentaries that I’d recommend, starting with Blackfish, Sharkwater, The Ghosts in Our Machine, The Last Animals, Carnage: Swallowing the Past, and the wonderful books by Marc Bekoff, Carl Safina, Peter Singer, Lori Gruen, and so many others.

Regarding your food choices, how do you describe yourself?

A joyful vegan.

If you had one message to deliver to others, what would it be?

Every choice we make matters and affects the lives of others. The status quo keeps us on this mindless path, unawakened to what’s happening behind closed doors. The kinder choices, those that take into account the lives of others, are always the right choices, and those choices will always feel good.

We’re so lucky to exist on this improbable, living earth but for one tiny moment in time. We strive for happiness and for lives of purpose and meaning. We seek comfort and peace and freedom from harm. In that, we differ little from the other lucky animals who inhabit this beautiful place. If we can all make kindness and compassion a priority in our day-to-day lives, and if we can treat all others the way we hope to be treated — with kindness and care and respect — we’d be one big collective step closer to a world where we can all live free from harm.

If you had one wish that was guaranteed to come true, what would it be?

All forms of animal exploitation would end today.

What advice do you have for people who say that they want to help animals in need but are too debilitated by what they witness?

Animal abuse is an absolute emergency for billions of innocent victims, and each of us can step up to help end it. We can end it by not buying and consuming their bodies. It’s a way of curbing, not only animal cruelty, but climate change, pollution, and the global food shortage. If we’re hurt, debilitated, or paralyzed by what we witness, we can just change what we eat.